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Full-Text Articles in Sociology
Closing The Gap: A Research Agenda For The Study Of Health Needs Among American Indian/Native Hawaiian Transgender Individuals, Irene S. Vernon, Trudie Jackson
Closing The Gap: A Research Agenda For The Study Of Health Needs Among American Indian/Native Hawaiian Transgender Individuals, Irene S. Vernon, Trudie Jackson
Ethnic Studies Review
Objectives: To explore health research needs of American Indian and Native Hawaiian (AIINH) transgender individuals. Methods: This qualitative study is composed of four focus groups and one informal meeting, totaling 42 AIINH transgender individuals in four major cities. The theoretical and methodological approaches combined grounded theory with the principles of community based participatory research. Results: Healthcare and resiliency are two main themes that emerged as research needs with important subcategories within them. Access to quality care from medical professionals and access to care that is unique to their trans gender status were subcategories within healthcare. Lived experiences, culture, and history …
Ida B. Wells And The Forces Of Democratization, Jane Duran
Ida B. Wells And The Forces Of Democratization, Jane Duran
Ethnic Studies Review
The work of Ida B. Wells is examined not only from the standpoint of her anti-lynching writings, but from a perusal of her diaries and her efforts as a young woman. It is concluded that she exemplifies the best of the notion of a genuine democratic political force.
Identity And The Legislative Decision Making Process: A Case Study Of The Maryland State Legislature, Nadia Brown
Identity And The Legislative Decision Making Process: A Case Study Of The Maryland State Legislature, Nadia Brown
Ethnic Studies Review
Both politicians and the mass public believe that identity influences political behavior yet, political scientists have failed to fully detail how identity is salient for all political actors not just minorities and women legislators. To what extent do racial, gendered, and race/gendered identities affect the legislation decision process? To test this proposition, I examine how race and gender based identities shape the legislative decisions of Black women in comparison to White men, White women, and Black men. I find that Black men and women legislators interviewed believe that racial identity is relevant in their decision making processes, while White men …
The Dear Diane Letters And The Bintel Brief: The Experiences Of Chinese And Jewish Immigrant Women In Encountering America, Hong Cai
Ethnic Studies Review
This paper employs assimilation theory to examine the experiences of Chinese and Jewish immigrant women at similar stages of their encounters with America. By focusing on the letters in Dear Diane: Letters from Our Daughters (1983), and Dear Diane: Questions and Answers for Asian American Women (1983), and earlier in the century, the letters translated and printed in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward (1971), this paper compares and contrasts the experiences of Chinese and Jewish women in America. It concludes that, though they have their own unique characteristics, …
The Possibilities Of Asian American Citizenship: A Critical Race And Gender Analysis, Clare Ching Jen
The Possibilities Of Asian American Citizenship: A Critical Race And Gender Analysis, Clare Ching Jen
Ethnic Studies Review
Conventionally, citizenship is understood as a legal category of membership in a national polity that ensures equal rights among its citizens. This conventional understanding, however, begs disruption when the histories and experiences of marginalized groups are brought to the fore. Equal citizenship in all its forms for marginalized populations has yet to be realized. For Asian Americans, rights presumably accorded to the legal status of citizenship have proven tenuous across different historical and political moments. Throughout U.S. history, "Asian American" or "Oriental" men and women have been designated aliens against whom white male and female citizenships have been legitimized. These …
Chicana/Latina Undergraduate Cultural Capital: Surviving And Thriving In Higher Education, Maricela Demirjyn
Chicana/Latina Undergraduate Cultural Capital: Surviving And Thriving In Higher Education, Maricela Demirjyn
Ethnic Studies Review
This study addressed the retention of Chicana/Latina undergraduates. The problem explored was one; how these women perceive campus climate as members of a marginalized student population and two; which strategies are used to "survive the system." As a qualitative study, this work was guided by a confluence of methods including grounded theory, phenomenology and Chicana epistemology using educational narratives as data. The analysis indicated that Chicanas/Latinas do maintain a sense of being "Other" throughout their college experiences and this self-identity is perceived as a "survival strategy" while attending a mainstream campus. Further analysis also showed that Chicanas/Latinas begin their college …
Women Without A Voice: The Paradox Of Silence In The Works Of Sandra Cisneros, Shashi Deshpande And Azar Nafisi, Sharon K. Wilson, Pelgy Vaz
Women Without A Voice: The Paradox Of Silence In The Works Of Sandra Cisneros, Shashi Deshpande And Azar Nafisi, Sharon K. Wilson, Pelgy Vaz
Ethnic Studies Review
Women of every culture face a similar problem: loss of voice. Their lives are permeated with silence. Whether their silence results from a patriarchal society that prohibits women from asserting their identity or from a social expectation of gender roles that confine women to an expressive domain-submissive, nurturing, passive, and domestic-rather than an instrumental role where men are dominant, affective and aggressive-women share the common bond of a debilitating silence. Maria Racine, in her analysis of Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, reaffirms the pervasiveness of this bond: "For women, silence has crossed every racial and …
Orientals Need Apply: Gender-Based Asylum In The U.S., Midori Takagi
Orientals Need Apply: Gender-Based Asylum In The U.S., Midori Takagi
Ethnic Studies Review
Every other year I teach a course entitled "The History of Asian Women in America," which focuses on the experiences of East, South and Southeast Asian women as they journey to these shores and resettle. Using autobiographies, poetry, journal writings, interviews and academic texts, the students learn from the women what political, social, cultural, economic and ecological conditions prompted them to leave their homelands and why they chose the United States. We learn of their rich cultural backgrounds, their struggles to create a subculture based on their home and host experiences, and the cultural gaps that often appear between the …
How Does Race Operate Among Asian Americans In The Labor Market? : Occupational Segregation And Different Rewards By Occupation Among Native-Born Chinese American And Japanese American Male Workers, Chang Won Lee
Ethnic Studies Review
The effect of race in the U.S. labor market has long been controversial. One posits that racial effects have been diminished since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Alba & Nee, 2003; Sakamoto, Wu, & Tzeng, 2000; Wilson, 1980). Even if some disparities in labor-market outcomes among race groups are found, advocates of this "declining significance of race" thesis do not attribute these disparities to racial discrimination. They, instead, understand the racial gaps as a result of class composition of racial minority groups, classes represented by larger proportions of the working-class population (Wilson, 1980, 1997) as well as unskilled-immigrant …
[Review Of] Irene Vilar, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony Of An Abortion Addict, Jade Hidle
[Review Of] Irene Vilar, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony Of An Abortion Addict, Jade Hidle
Ethnic Studies Review
From its flesh-toned cover etched with red tallies marking the author's fifteen aborted pregnancies, to its unflinching accounts of each procedure, Irene Vilar's Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict forces readers to confront the issue of abortion. Though the topic is inevitably divisive, Vilar's purpose, as stated from the prologue of her memoir, is clearly neither didactic nor partisan.
To Arrange Or Not: Marriage Trends In The South Asian American Community, Farha Ternikar
To Arrange Or Not: Marriage Trends In The South Asian American Community, Farha Ternikar
Ethnic Studies Review
The idea of the arranged marriage has always seemed "exotic" yet has fascinated the American public. Recent media coverage of arranged marriages is evident in popular periodicals such as the New York Times Online (August 17, 2000) and Newsweek (March 15, 1999). Foner highlights that the arranged marriage is an example of "the continued impact of premigration cultural beliefs and social practices" that South Asian immigrants have transported to the United States (Foner 1997, 964). She offers an interpretive synthesis by showing that "[n]ew immigrant family patterns are shaped by cultural meanings and social practices that immigrants bring with them …
Are We Happy Yet?: Re-Evaluating The Evaluation Of Indigenous Community Development, Kerin Gould
Are We Happy Yet?: Re-Evaluating The Evaluation Of Indigenous Community Development, Kerin Gould
Ethnic Studies Review
As I was working on research into Indigenous community development, I wanted to get an overview of how things are going - are projects improving well-being? What is working and what isn't? I found I couldn't get a clear multi-dimensional picture. So I had to wonder, about evaluation criteria and what the alternatives were. How can we, as academics and researchers and allies, make sense of the available information in such a way that our work is meaningful to the Indigenous communities we work with?
Chinese Americans And The Borderland Experience On Golden Mountain: The Development Of A Chinese American Identity In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts, Diane Todd Bucci
Ethnic Studies Review
In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston tells the story of her immigrant family and their efforts to rise above their working-class status in America, which optimistic Chinese regard as the Golden Mountain. The Hongs' experience is not unlike that of other immigrants who come to America to escape hardship in their homeland and hope to live the American Dream. The road to American success has numerous obstacles, and immigrants encounter many conflicts on their journey. One conflict relates to their cultural identities. Gloria Anzaldúa uses the word "borderland" to refer to the meeting …
The Apartheid Conscience: Gender, Race, And Re-Imagining The White Nation In Cyberspace, R. Sophie Statzel
The Apartheid Conscience: Gender, Race, And Re-Imagining The White Nation In Cyberspace, R. Sophie Statzel
Ethnic Studies Review
It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts; the world we find ourselves in is one we have helped to create, and this places constraints upon how we think the world anew.
"No Opportunity For Song:" A Slovak Immigrant's Silencing Analyzed Through Her Pronoun Choice, Danusha V. Goska
"No Opportunity For Song:" A Slovak Immigrant's Silencing Analyzed Through Her Pronoun Choice, Danusha V. Goska
Ethnic Studies Review
I can't tell the most frightening story I know, because stories are made of words, and once I was without them. I was trekking in Nepal and ended up with amnesia. Later I stumbled into a mission hospital with a bruised jaw. A bad fall? I can't say. I had no words. No words for this thing that was wrenching and crying, in which "I" - a bundle of terror - seemed trapped. No words for where I began, stopped, or the mud stubble terrace on which I sat. No words to map, no words to define, no words to …
Resistance And Reinvention Of The Subject In Jackie Kay's Trumpet, A. Lâmia Gülçur
Resistance And Reinvention Of The Subject In Jackie Kay's Trumpet, A. Lâmia Gülçur
Ethnic Studies Review
In her work Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval claims that although inequities in material sources and subordination by race, class, nation, gender and sex continue to operate under the protection of law and order, a new kind of psychic penetration that respects no previous boundaries is evolving. She argues that "Mutation in culture, today, makes new forms of identity, ethics, citizenship, aesthetics and resistance accessible" (36.7).
[Review Of] Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Unequal Freedom: How Race And Gender Shaped American Citizenship And Labor, Philip Q. Yang
[Review Of] Evelyn Nakano Glenn. Unequal Freedom: How Race And Gender Shaped American Citizenship And Labor, Philip Q. Yang
Ethnic Studies Review
Evelyn Glenn is among the pioneers who laid the groundwork for an intersective approach of race, class, and gender to the analysis of social inequality. This new book carries on and extends her well-established intellectual project along this line of inquiry in both depth and breadth. In Unequal Freedom, Glenn offers an exemplary historical and comparative analysis of how race and gender as fundamental organizing principles of social institutions shaped American citizenship and labor system from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. She begins with a brief introduction to the book project in the introductory …
[Review Of] Patricia V. Symonds. Calling In The Soul: Gender And The Cycle Of Life In A Hmong Village, Jeremy Hein
[Review Of] Patricia V. Symonds. Calling In The Soul: Gender And The Cycle Of Life In A Hmong Village, Jeremy Hein
Ethnic Studies Review
Hmong Americans are a diaspora group that came from Laos after leaving southern China in the early 1800s. The U.S. C.I.A. recruited a Hmong army during the 1960s to assist with the American military campaign against communism in Southeast Asia. Hmong refugees began arriving in the United States in 1975 following the collapse of the pro-American Laotian government. There are now about 200,000 Hmong Americans.
[Review Of] Garbi Schmidt, Islam In Urban America: Sunni Muslims In Chicago, Jess Hollenback
[Review Of] Garbi Schmidt, Islam In Urban America: Sunni Muslims In Chicago, Jess Hollenback
Ethnic Studies Review
Islam in Urban America: Sunni Muslims in Chicago is a well-researched, carefully nuanced, and timely contribution to our understanding of Muslim Americans and an excellent corrective to the all-too-common tendency to homogenize both Islam and Muslims. This study stresses the multiple elements of diversity in American Islam by focusing on how ethnicity, class, gender, class, age, and ideology have influenced the presentation and practice of Sunni Islam among immigrant communities in Chicago during the 1990s. Garbi Schmidt is currently a researcher in the ethnic minorities program at the Danish National Institute of Social Research in Copenhagen. This book is a …
[Review Of] Jun Xing And Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Eds. Reversing The Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, And Sexuality Through Film, Susan Crutchfield
[Review Of] Jun Xing And Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Eds. Reversing The Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, And Sexuality Through Film, Susan Crutchfield
Ethnic Studies Review
The fourteen essays collected in Xing and Hirabayashi's new volume make a strong argument for serious intellectual work involved not only in the college-level study of moving images for their messages about minority groups but also in pedagogical approaches that take film and video as their primary texts. Written by a collection of scholars who work in ethnic and racial studies and various allied fields, the essays share a concern with pedagogy and with showing "how visual media can be used to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and communications, particularly with respect to the thorny topics of ethnicity and race" (3). Indeed, …
[Review Of] Rachel C. Lee. The Americas Of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions Of Nation And Transnation, David Goldstein-Shirley
[Review Of] Rachel C. Lee. The Americas Of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions Of Nation And Transnation, David Goldstein-Shirley
Ethnic Studies Review
Rachel C. Lee acknowledges that understanding Asian American experiences merits the study of transglobal migrations of persons and capital. Rather than criticize this scholarly trend in Asian American studies (and, I would add, in ethnic studies more broadly), Lee integrates into them a greater attention to gender. Like much of historical and social scholarship, works on the Asian American diaspora tend to neglect gender. By examining how gender figures into the various ways in which four Asian American writers imagine "America," Lee reminds us that gender, like race, always matters.
[Review Of] Yanick St. Jean And Joe R. Feagin. Double Burden: Black Women And Everyday Racism, Lisa Pillow
[Review Of] Yanick St. Jean And Joe R. Feagin. Double Burden: Black Women And Everyday Racism, Lisa Pillow
Ethnic Studies Review
The women interviewed in Double Burden share personal accounts of what it is like to be black and female in the contemporary United States. Drawing on over two hundred interviews with middle-class, well-educated black women, Yannick St. Jean and Joe R. Feagin present a collective memory of the misrepresentation of black women in our history, as well as individual experiences and triumphs. Through excerpts of personal narratives on topics including career, work, physical appearance, media representation, relationships with white women, and motherhood, the women recount experiences dealing with everyday racism, the denigrating social messages about their beauty, self-worth, sexuality, intelligence, …
Afrocentric Ideologies And Gendered Resistance In Daughters Of The Dust And Malcolm X: Setting, Scene, And Spectatorship, David Jones
Ethnic Studies Review
This study of scenes from the films Daughters of the Dust and Malcolm X, describes images of myth, gender, and resistance familiar to African-American interpretive communities. Key thematic and technical elements of these films are opposed to familiar Hollywood practices, indicating the directors' effort to address resisting spectators. Both filmmakers, Julie Dash and Spike Lee respectively, chose subjects with an ideological resonance in African-American collective memory: Malcolm X, eulogized by Ossie Davis as "our living black manhood"(i) and the women of the Gullah Sea Islands, a site often celebrated for its authentically African cultural survivals. Both films combine images of …
Like Sustenance For The Masses: Genre Resistance, Cultural Identity, And The Achievement Of Like Water For Chocolate, Ellen Puccinelli
Like Sustenance For The Masses: Genre Resistance, Cultural Identity, And The Achievement Of Like Water For Chocolate, Ellen Puccinelli
Ethnic Studies Review
Laura Esquivel's 1989 Mexican novel Like Water for Chocolate, neither translated into English nor published in the United States until 1992, was both an American bestseller and the basis for an acclaimed motion picture. Interestingly, though, Esquivel's work also seems to be receiving glimmers of the type of critical attention generally reserved for less "popular" works. Two particular critical studies composed in English, one by Kathleen Glenn and the other by Cecelia Lawless, have been devoted entirely to Chocolate, and both of the scholar/authors grace the faculties of reputable American institutions of higher learning.^1 As a student whose academic experience …
[Review Of] Tey Diana Rebolledo, Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis Of Chicana Literature, Maythee Rojas
[Review Of] Tey Diana Rebolledo, Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis Of Chicana Literature, Maythee Rojas
Ethnic Studies Review
The first book-length study of the Chicana literary tradition, Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature is a superb work and salient contribution to Chicana literature and criticism. A companion volume to Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (U of Arizona Press 1993), Rebolledo's book takes its metaphorical title from the image of Chicanas using the "blank page" as a means for channeling their creative energies despite the fact that they are often faced with "a cold, inhospitable, and unreceptive culture" (ix). As she notes, "although there have been many attempts to silence Chicanas, they …